Project Management Guide

Metrics collection is an excellent way track the project, measure the performance.  Software metrics provides objective information to help the project managers to do:

1. Metrics provides objective information throughout the software organization. This reduces the ambiguity that often surrounds complex and constrained software projects.
2. Measurement helps managers to identify, prioritize, track and communicate project issues at all levels within the organization.
3. Metrics can accurately describe the status of software project processes and products. It is key to objectively representing the progress of project activities and the quality of associated software products across the project life cycle. Metrics helps to answer questions such as “Is the project on schedule?” or “is the software ready to be delivered to the user?” etc.
4. Project metrics facilitates a proactive management strategy. Potential problems are objectively identified as risks to be assesses and managed. Existing problems can be better evaluated and prioritized. Metrics fosters the early discovery and correction of technical and management problems that can be more difficult or costly to resolve later.
5. Software Project Managers can use metrics as a resource to anticipate problems and to avoid being forced into a reactive, fix on fail approach.
6. Metrics help the decision maker to assess the impacts of decisions objectively and make informed trade-offs to best meet project objectives and to optimize software project and product performance.
7. Metrics provides an effective rationale for selecting the best alternatives. For example, the current software and IT business environments demand successful project performance. Business, technical and project managers must be able to defend the basis of their estimates and plans with historical performance data. Then, they must be able to justify changes to plans with current performance data.

Analysis of metrics can give the following benefits:

1. Increase return on investments
2. Pinpoints opportunities for improvement
3. Manage workloads
4. Reduce Overtime
5. Reduce cost

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